


Cracked Crystals

by karakael



Category: GaoGaiGar
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 18:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7373560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karakael/pseuds/karakael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people die as heroes. Others are forgotten by time. What is lost is rarely found, but there can still be hope.</p>
<p>this piece was written from an otppromt : "Imagine one member of your OTP dying, and the other living out their life alone. When they die, they find the other waiting in the afterlife for them." Light on the OTP, heavy on the death. Call-outs to DaiBuster themes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracked Crystals

She is remembered as a hero.

This fact holds true long after her name is forgotten - Renais - and her planet - Earth - lost to the mists of time. The story shifts and changes, takes on the qualities of legend then myth, and is shorn of all details but the most simple.

There was a woman once. She died to save a galaxy. On every planet that was freed from the Draxed, the story is told again and again, down the eons, details changing but that core truth remaining: There was a woman. She died to save a galaxy. In doing so, she saved _us_.

But at the time, no one was thinking of that.

\-----------------------

The 3G battalion was no longer tiny. In the years since preventing the collapse of the universe they had grown, gaining allies across the galaxy, going from one ship to three, from three to ten, then to half a hundred. By then they could truly claim their name; the Galaxy Guard; for they had become the protectors of the whole galaxy. They never stopped fighting. And they never stopped winning because there was no other acceptable option.

And then the Draxed came. At the time no one knew anything about them. They just...showed up one day with an army of unbelievable size and went about conquering the galaxy.

Before then 3G had dealt with dozens of threats, but the reality was that the Primevals had prevented any society from getting too large. Once a civilization reached the space age the Primevals would find and destroy it. After they were gone 3G was the first organization that began to pull the various planets together. There was no galactic council, yet, and so the best the nascent defense force could do against this sudden onslaught was contact every planet they’d ever saved and beg for reinforcements.

For the first time in a long, long while they were not winning, and things looked grim. World after world fell, not into oblivion as with the Primevals, but into slavery and oppression. No one knew where they were from, or how they did it, but the facts spoke for themselves. The Draxed were powerful enough to challenge the fledgling galaxy and were winning.

Then, at great personal expense, one slave world sent out an envoy to the 3G headquarters. Shortly thereafter the world was destroyed, wiped off the face of the universe in a show of such brutality that even the Primevals couldn’t compare. It was a clear act of punishment, and the Draxed’s infamy only spread and their conquest increased its speed.

But the envoy, the last of her race, brought a device that she swore was the weakness of the Draxed.

It was a crystal, about the size of a large filing cabinet, chemically akin to the G-Stones but with its powers exponentially increased. The envoy explained how the Draxed used the crystals as their main source of power, but more importantly as the way to communicate across the huge spans of space between the galaxies they controlled. That power, turned upon a population, could easily enslave whole worlds through mind control. Each one was connected in a massive network, and became the backbone of every new Draxed invasion. A single crystal was all that was needed per planet, and the fleet that 3G faced carried hundreds of such crystals per ship. The power was unimaginable to the humans, who had yet to fully unlock the limitless energy of their G-Stones and the information did little to quell their growing fears about their chances against their foes. But the envoy, as she was dying, swore that if this one crystal was destroyed, every Draxed in the universe would also die. Her whole planet had sacrificed themselves for this one chance, and they believed completely in 3Gs cause.

But 3G had no time to ponder and strategize with this new information. The Draxed were hard on the envoy’s heels with an army so large it blotted out the stars. A million destroyers, all focused upon the 3G base, with the single goal of getting back the crystal.

Which left 3G in a bit of a bind.

“We can’t kill every member of a race!” Mikoto insisted. “No one is irredeemably evil.”

“We’ll all die if we don’t.” Swan said. “We don’t have much choice.”

“But we have no way of knowing if the enslaved worlds will also be affected. What if we end up destroying half the galaxy?” Mikoto’s worries would have only intensified had she known that the crystals endangered thousands of other galaxies as well.

“We still don’t have much choice.” Kosuke watched as the wall of ships approached, blowing away the massive asteroid field 3G was hidden in with all the single-minded determination of a steamroller. Every second masses the size of Earth’s Sol were being wiped completely from existence, and the Draxed were only gaining.

“We can’t.” Mikoto said. “There are risks, and then there is this.” 

“Tesshin swore every member of her planet had been willing to risk it.” Guy said.

“And what of the thousands of other worlds? Do they not get a say?” Hyuuma snapped. He’d seen what happened to aliens cut from Draxed control. It wasn’t a fate he would wish on anyone.

“We don’t even know how to destroy it. None of our conventional weapons have worked against their ships and shields. And we don’t have any nukes left…” Liger said.

The argument went round and round the room, as each eye tried not to focus on the line of red that was approaching them and think instead on the billions of lives they were risking in this deadly gambit.

Then. 

“...where is Renais?” Guy asked, scanning the room and looking for an ally.

There was a moment’s silence. Then the explosion hit. 

\------------------------ 

The pod the crystal was kept in wasn’t large, nor hidden. It was simply stored in one of the stations main science bays, easy to maneuver with dozens of fail-safes that would automatically jettison the pod should anything go wrong with its shielding.

The entrance was down a long white corridor. There were no guards. The Draxed had no need for spies, and the humans knew better than to approach the danger. Only impervious robots approached the humming maelstrom of evil energy.

But J lounged against the wall anyway, eyes hooded, waiting. He knew what was coming, even if the rest of 3G was willfully blinding itself to the solution.

“I should expected you’d be here.”

Renais strolled down the corridor, coat loose, shoulders back, steel in her eyes.

“You won’t stop me.” it was a statement, not a question.

“No.” J said.

Weak last words for a hero. But no one else would hear them, so perhaps that was all that was needed.

She walked passed him, stride determined, and he was proud that he didn’t call out, didn’t try to stop her. And she didn’t turn back, didn’t even glance in his direction, never caught his eye, didn’t hesitate for a moment. Both of them knew what needed to be done, in the clear logic of warriors rather than idealists.

So he stood there, listening as her footsteps faded away. The emergency protocols were activated, flooding the corridor in red-light, and there was a rattle as the pod was jettisoned.

Then the explosion, and he still stood, arms crossed and eyes hooded, standing as witness.

\------------ 

They found him there, an hour later, sitting on the floor with his head pillowed in his arms. The Draxed fleet had been crippled, the destruction of one crystal repeated over every single link in the system. Now the whole 3G base was mobilized into familiar territory; rescue survivors and protect local worlds from debris. The gamble had paid off; there were plenty of survivors to rescue, and already requests for aid were flooding into the base, as whole worlds awoke from their mind-control and reached out.

No one had time for the hero. So it was only a small team that went to investigate what they already knew. Someone had jettisoned the science pod, then used a G-Stone as an amplifier of a natural heat-source to cause an explosion strong enough to obliterate every shard of the crystal.

There was only one person who could do that.

Still, when Liger saw J he flew into a rage.

“You didn’t stop her!” He screamed, needing to be physically held back by his aids. “You let her do this!”

“Yes.” And still he sat slumped with hooded eyes. 

“How could you?!”

“It was what needed to be done.”

“She was my daughter! She didn’t even say goodbye!”

“She knew you would stop her.”

“And you wouldn’t! You just stood there and let her go! How could you?”

Liger’s fist met J’s face, but the Soldato did not even flinch, and then an aid was pulling Liger away once again with whispered words of “we need you to examine the rubble.” and “if there’s any chance she’s still alive…” and “we don’t know for sure if…” but everyone involved knew it was pointless.

Yet Liger allowed himself to be dragged away nonetheless. His last words were “I don’t want that man on my ship ever again.” That, at least, he had control over.

\----------

J followed his orders. By the time the rubble was cleared, the J-Arc was gone. The Soldato took only one thing of his partner’s, and never again spoke to 3G. Even as Renais was being hailed as a hero across the cosmos, the man who had been her closest friend was gone, taking only her G-stone with him.

\---------

In the end, Renais’s actions proved justified. Only the Draxed high command was linked closely enough to the crystals to be destroyed, leaving most of their people living, though severely broken. It wasn’t just one galaxy she saved with her reckless act, either. The Draxed had conquered thousands of galaxies before arriving at the Milky Way. Around the universe, people came to remember the name of Renais Cardiff-Shishio, and the sacrifice she made to save all of them. Her story went down in history, lasting far longer in memory than any other action by a single human.

J, by comparison, was not remembered at all.

\-----

The instant J left 3G, he fell out of history. Try as they might, 3G had no success in contacting him. He still lived, that much they knew, and occasionally there were reports of him, fighting on the outreaches of the galaxy, always on the side of the oppressed, usually losing.

There were plenty of stories of a silver battleship appearing at the last minute, turning a hopeless tide and allowing victory for the small and weak. But there were just as many of a ghost ship, fighting alongside those destined for failure, doing nothing but allowing a few more souls to escape inevitable destruction. 

No war was too small for the silver battleship, no situation too dire. Time and again it appeared, just long enough for a final battle, only to be gone the moment the flags of victory or defeat were hoisted. No one knew its name, no one knew its pilot. But for centuries the end was heralded by its appearance.

When J died, no one noticed. It was on one of a million battlefields, and his ship was part of a fleet of hundreds. By then he was more machine than man, living only from fight to fight, memories and emotions alike repressed to meaninglessness. He had never allowed himself to seek death, but it came as no surprise and he fell gratefully into it. 

The victors thought nothing of him when they boarded his ship, seeing just another mercenary hired by the a desperate planet in a last bid for freedom. They saw only an ancient ship, badly damaged from years of use, its captain slumped across the controls. There was no obvious cause of death, and the ship itself should have been salvageable, but nothing moved no matter what they tried. There was little enough to loot, no personal belongings or trade goods, and only one, strange, item of value.

\----------------- 

“Well, it took you long enough.”

In the space between, J woke to a presence at his back. Yet when he twisted to see, there was nothing there. Just endless green fog, and the feeling of something watching him.

“You didn’t take very good care of yourself.” There was accusation in the sentence, but it wasn’t spoken aloud. Or was it? For some reason he couldn’t seem to focus. He reached out, but he had no body to move, and pink suffused both body and mind. 

“Look at how scratched you are. You could have tried a bit harder.”

The voice - presence - other brought him back to himself, the fond teasing somehow familiar. A name crossed his mind, but like everything else he could not focus, couldn’t feel anything except an odd sense of peace.

“Don’t sleep yet, love. I’ve waited too long to lose you again.”

Something touched him, a brush so light and yet he felt it in a way that should not have been possible in death. He was dead, right?

“Close enough. Certainly you’ll never be trapped again.”

Again a touch, and this time he responded, reaching out and feeling as the other slipped through his fingers. No, not fingers. Tendrils? Extensions? Something he could reach with. 

“Further, love. You’ll never catch me that way.”

For the first time in centuries he felt a flicker of annoyance. If he was dead, shouldn’t he be allowed his peace? That had been his goal, had it not? To fight until he could go to his rest and see...her...again…

“Renais?”

“Mmm. Of a sort.” 

And she was there. Not in a form he could ever have recognized, but undeniably her. Within the green haze he felt her, only a few microns away, her presence surrounding him, open and welcoming in a way he had not felt since...since she had died.

Somewhere deep within him a barrier shifted and changed. All this time, and the distance between them had been so small. Just a single step away…

\--------------------- 

“I’ve never seen a power-stone like this before.” Complained the salvage operator.

His supervisor wandered over to the captain's corpse. Most of their enemies now were powered by stones of one kind or another. Apparently they were favored by those who believed in freedom and equality and all that idealist idiocy. It was unusual to find a mercenary sporting one, however. 

“Is it Red or Green? The Greens sell better nowadays.”

“That’s just it.” the salvager shoved at the corpse, revealing a long green scarf wrapped around one of the body’s arms. “The one stone came out easy, but this one…”

The supervisor took a closer look. Somehow a G-stone had been stitched into the fabric of the scarf. It appeared that one of the mercenary's last acts had been to remove it and tie it to his own power source. 

The scavenger assumed it must have been in a futile effort to gain more power or to stave off the inevitable. Clearly it hadn’t worked, as the captain was dead as empty space.

Yet…

“Just break the stones apart.” 

“That’s just it. I can’t. They’re completely fused.”

The supervisor whistled. “Huh. Then sell ‘em to those 3G bastards. Maybe they’ll get a kick out of the novelty. Certainly no one will be able to use them ever again.”

\----------------

Deep inside the stones, J flew on wings of crystal, chasing after the flickers of his partner, winding deeper and deeper into her reflections. She’d had centuries of waiting to perfect her game, but he learned quickly. He felt her laughter echo through each facet of his form and finally, finally he was free.

\---------------

((epilogue))

Reds could not be pilots. Everyone knew that. They couldn’t bond with any of the common crystals, and the few remaining Jewels were all locked away in museums, to precious to be offered to juvie pilots, especially ones that shouldn’t be so brazen to join the flight corps in the first place. 

So all one really needed to do was find a relic so old no one would care if it went missing. At least that was 45-118s logic when they snuck into the ancient archives. No one had ever dared petition the stone kept there. No one even knew its name, despite the fact that the sensors felt a clear presence within it. It was nothing like the Lion’s Stone, which had traveled through so many hands that its original personality had been long since lost. 

Hah. A lowly Red would never be allowed near that stone. But 45-118 wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. It wasn’t enough of a challenge to prove their cause. So instead they slipped around another security droid and into the dusty display of the most ancient of pre-galactic artifacts.

The stone was behind a thick barrier, but 45-118 had come prepared. A single psy-blast - the specialty of the Reds - and the stone was within reach. In their mind a timer began counting. Two minutes until security arrived. They had to make their case and win over the stone by then.

They focused on their question, holding it in their mind. Then they reached out…

“Please. I want to fly.”

\---

It was enough. When security appeared to arrest 45-118, the young Red was clutching the strange stone to their breast, radiating equal parts pride and determination.

It seemed impossible that anyone, much less an untrained Red child, could have finally gotten through to the stone, but 45-118 was clear. The stone had a name - Fusion - and a planet - Earth. And now, resting in the child’s mind, were the coordinates to the battleship that could take them home.


End file.
